


count the cost

by chameleonchanging



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Turn Left
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23641795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chameleonchanging/pseuds/chameleonchanging
Summary: Order 66 goes live and Wolffe watches Plo Koon's ship burn in the Cato Nemoidian sky. He can't walk away without knowing for sure his beloved is dead. Maybe it would have been better if he was.A "what if" forand counting: Plo Koon survives the crash and is rendered Force-blind as a result.
Relationships: Plo Koon/CC-3636 | Wolffe
Comments: 41
Kudos: 88





	count the cost

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [and counting](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23145280) by [chameleonchanging](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chameleonchanging/pseuds/chameleonchanging). 



Wolffe lives. It is the worst thing that has ever happened to him.

Plo’s ship loses an engine to the first shot and veers off course. The second strikes near the cockpit and fire spreads forward; then the ship carves a line through a building and it doesn’t really matter what was burning first because everything is burning, ship, Jedi, the tears running down Wolffe’s face, the sudden silent spot in the back of his mind that had been both fear and forgiveness a moment before. On the ground, tucked away in the command center, Wolffe watches the only person he has ever known how to love die because good soldiers follow orders and the Jedi were ordered to die for the Republic.

But Wolffe is more than just a good soldier; he is a man as well, and he learned to be a man not only from the Cuy’val Dar but from Plo as well, and perhaps Plo has been the greater influence. Good soldiers follow orders; good men follow their hearts, and Wolffe’s heart cannot bear to walk away from its partner without knowing for certain that spark has extinguished. He follows the smoke to the crash site, into the canyons far beneath the city, and the trail of debris leads him to the remnants of a ship that had been Plo’s pride, still smouldering. 

This is what changes: Plo is alive. He is a burnt husk of a man, raw and weeping and insensate with pain, but he is alive. He is missing all of one leg and three-quarters of the other, and his arms are mangled and charred from the fire, and his mask has fused to his face, and if he could speak over the agony perhaps he would have had something to say about the decision that lies before Wolffe. Perhaps if Wolffe were more of a Mando, he would have made a different choice. 

But Wolffe is a man who is looking at the tattered remains of his heart, and he has lived his 13 years a protector to all that he loves, and he can only see that Plo Koon, his beloved first and all else second, needs protection and shelter, so that is what he seeks.

* * *

Wolffe steals an entire pharmaceuticals cabinet from medical and loads it into the ship he has chosen for the journey to safety. He takes the Dorin gas cylinders as well, and every spare filter he can get his hands on, though he has no idea how to change a filter on a mask that won’t come off. He takes food and water and a hermetically-sealing tent, and he’s almost done pilfering the supply of disinfectant when he’s caught and has to get them both off-world in a hurry. They are in hyperspace on a direct route to Dorin before Wolffe realizes what he has been missing:

Plo is gone. 

Plo has been a constant presence in Wolffe’s mind for years now. They have been bonded to one another by the Force, and even though Wolffe is as near Force-blind as can be, he  _ knows _ what Plo’s presence feels like, however drugged, unconscious, asleep, even comatose. He is not silent. He is missing. 

He rushes to the back where Plo is laid out on a table, strapped down with pain medication dripping into his veins. The monitors say he lives. The harsh death-rattle of his breathing says he lives, but still Wolffe cannot bring himself to believe. He steps forward, desperate, lays a finger to Plo’s neck, and everything erupts in red-white- _ nothing _ .

* * *

When Wolffe wakes again he is on the floor of the bay, his blacks soaked through in sweat and his throat hoarse from screaming. Every one of his muscles is sore, and it does not feel like punishment enough for what he has done. 

Plo lives, and his world is fire and pain. He is blind, and deaf, and all that is left to him is his Kel Dor telepathy. The Force has abandoned him to his fate. He can only experience the world through another’s eyes, and he cannot bear to be touched. He has been saved only to be condemned, and cruelty of cruelties, Wolffe was judge and jury. 

The stars streak by in the cockpit viewport, and Wolffe curls up in the pilot’s seat - the seat that should be Plo’s by right - and cries. He has never felt so alone.

* * *

The Kel Dor are horrified when they see what has become of Plo. Fire has always been something of a foreign entity to them; an intellectual danger, not a visceral one. There are no burn wards on Dorin. They offer everything they can anyway. Swathed in bandages and sunk under by the constant drip of sedative and narcotics, Plo looks nothing like his former self. He has had three surgeries in three days, and between them he is suspended in bacta so what little of his skin survived the burning can regrow for harvest and grafting. All the while, he screams at a volume so loud the healers have to block him from their minds when they work on him lest they be injured as well. 

Wolffe sleeps by the tank in his sealed suit. If he could only  _ touch _ Plo, if he could only reach him, let him know someone is with him - but contact is an infection risk, and the healers won’t allow him to self-flagellate. The closest he can get now is in the brief moments when Plo is being transferred in or out of bacta, and even then he is watched like a shriek-hawk so he can’t harm either of them, even if perhaps he already is.

The healers know - and Wolffe does as well - that Plo is unlikely to survive. Not with almost all of his body charred, not with his Force sense ripped away, not trapped in an unending hell of agonizing moments strung together between doses of medication. The healers know also that Wolffe is the only person left in the galaxy who might have any right to speak for Plo now that the Jedi have been purged from existence, and Wolffe has lost too much to be able to see that letting go could be the kindest thing to do. He has never imagined continuing in a world without Plo in it. 

* * *

The thing he has not considered: he may not have to.

* * *

It is several months since the Order and the Order’s fall, and word has trickled out of a man with a wolf’s face and a man who should have died, and if Wolffe had anything left in him he would have  _ thought _ about it, he would have  _ known _ to keep moving and keep quiet, but there’s only room in him for his fractured soul and everything it takes to keep him alive. He knows now he was chasing a fool’s dream. Plo burns with infection now, and the grafts are failing. He still hasn’t awoken. 

It won’t matter; the Empire’s newest attack dog is on its way. There is word of this too: a monster in black with breaths like a machine and a blade of crimson, who trails violent death in its wake. 

Wolffe sits in front of Plo’s tank, Plo’s saber in hand. He’d retrieved it from the wreckage, and these many weeks it has rested on Wolffe’s hip. A lightsaber is its master’s life, and for how poorly he has taken care of Plo, he will not allow himself to neglect this aspect of his duty as well. The metal thrums with life, a living warmth sinking into his hand as he examines it. This saber was Plo’s first, painstakingly repaired and brought out of retirement after its destruction early in his training, and the one that Wolffe learned to fight with. He imagines its hatred, its resentment of him for his failure, and accepts it as his due. But he thinks also that however much it hates him, it still loves Plo, and to that end, it will help him make this stand.

Plo deserves better than to die violently at the hands of a traitor. 

The lights flicker and dim, and all that is left is the glow of the tank, and in front of it, Wolffe is silhouetted in the pale blue light. There is the screech of distorting metal, and boot-falls on steel, and Darth Vader is there.

Wolffe rises to meet him.  _ For you, my beloved, _ he thinks, and thumbs the ignition. 


End file.
